halloween to new years in nyc

Family and friends,

I’m two months deep in New York City. I’m working for Gray, my grandmother on dad’s side for the moment. She runs an antique jewelry shop on 47th street in Manhattan. She’s been studying and publishing on antiques for decades, she’s a master on the subject. And lives here in the big swarming by herself. She is a bold lady, a renegade for her generation, and an awesome grandmother. She trusts me alot. I feel really lucky to be able to actually live and work with a grandparent for a good chunk of time, long enough to develop a rhythm. It’s a situation like I would only have read about in a book, living with one of the family elders long enough to absorb the lore.

A rhythm. We wake in the morning, tea and granola and out of the building around 9:30. That’s all rather quick and glossed over the details, best of which is the view: sitting up in bed I look out through a double pane of glass and see Sixth Avenue stretching out and away from me, running south. Can see a line of yellow traffic for a couple dozen blocks, down to about 34th street, I think. Think it’s where Broadway clips across at a slight diagonal, where a building shaped like a triangle is blocking the view all the way south to the end of the island. I can hear that traffic too, but the windows are good for blocking sound. I’m sure it must be a popping industry, sound-proofing windows in a city like this, the booming metropolis, the city that never sleeps. The cops and ambulance drivers all practice making funny whoops and whallops with their sirens at all hours of the night.

Try to do some sit-ups in the floor of the bathroom. Kinda cramped space, but it feels good to lie on the floor first thing, and to force blood around. All the Germans I’ve ever met always talk about “Circulation” like it is the cure-all for health issues. Not sure I disagree with them. Anyways, I do it as the first in a series of waking rituals. Second is the fifteen seconds of cold water shock at the end of the shower. Hurts when you do it, hurts like hell so you shout out loud (which is the third ritual, shouting), but afterwards you glow warm and alert like a startled animal. You are. I am. Fourth is a cup of earl grey at breakfast. Pour the first cup, start sipping it piping hot with the heat-bloated teabag floating on the surface, bobbing against my lip and searing the nerves into alertness. You know, bergamot is a kind of citrus? One teabag makes two cups. I drink them both ’cause I like to be wired.

We walk the way to work. Gigi holds onto my arm, crook in crook of elbows like line dancers. I try not to stoop to her, to stand up straight and be conscious of posture. We’re all wrapped in layers and dad’s heavy black coat from Debrovnik, keeps me warm and stops the skyscraper-canyon winds from snatching my heat away. She hangs on so she doesn’t fall in the frozen gutters where last week’s blizzard still clings. Ice to concrete. Ice on filthy concrete. A very weird juxtapose, snow in a city.

Setting up the window is like conducting a dance of minutia, or assembling a small room of a jigsaw puzzle. I run a very exact ritual, where the fun is in anticipating all the movements and executing them with increasing speed and precision. It’s a game of dexterity. I go down to the basement and get Gray’s cases full of antique jewelry, the old boxey Georgian stuff, garnets and foil-backed stones, and the Victorian-era pieces. Bring em back up and wheel them to the counter, unload boxed and then the game. It’s probably two hours straight every morning, setting everything in it’s right place, arranging everything in the front window with the public walking by outside. I feel like I’m being watched, standing up high behind the glass, conducting a silent symphony of placement. So many small things, all organized like a museum model. Kinda feel like I’ve just woken up when it’s all done. Definitely elsewhere; it feels good to have sustained concentration for a long time, it’s like those two hours disappear. Careful, that.

Spend the day running. Running errands for Gigi, running rings to small cramped forges in the seventh floor of skyscrapers where hunched eastern European men work their heritage crafts of enameling, cutting, carving, soldering. Metal-workers. Jewelers. Lapidaries. It’s strange stuff. Speak to them and find out they learned what they know from the old men in their small Romanian hometowns. No other way to learn it, can’t be learnt in a school. Do we have that in America? Apprenticeships? Buried crafts? Run for lunch. I love it, being sent out into the busy streets with jacket pockets full of small envelopes and a long mental list of destinations. The first couple of days, I was in shock, trying to remember addresses and floors and room numbers, names that I’d never heard of, shop-talk terms that I’d never heard of, getting off the elevator on the twelth floor and walking into a hallway choked with men swaying in prayer and loud recital. There are many people and paths in the fray. T’say there’s 190 languages spoken in NYC. Lotta Jews and Russians on 47th. Men with small hats on their crowns, covering their balding, long long curled locks wrapped around their ears or dangling down to their shoulders, black coattails trailing in their constant hurry. Me too. It’s the same game I’ve been playing since the halls of Benjaming Russell HS, walking at top speed and carving through the moving mass of walkers without collision. Makes you feel like Bourne. Like physical chess. It’s another awareness ritual. Think we’re shaped by the games we play.

I sit sometimes for too long. The inside of the shop is like a ship, like a tight hallway. Me and gigi have learned to do the dance unconsciously, passing each other a million times a day as she gets up and down and up and down to speak to clients or to work on the computer, me filing and assisting and running and playing James Brown radio on tinny laptop speakers to up the mood. The awkwardness of being hyperconscious of everyone in the Exchange, in the room of small private shops and counters, where every day you see the same people, the same almost-strangers working their businesses and living their years, seeing them and knowing they see you too, each wanting to be comfortable and to get the polite morning “good morning” out of the way. With time, I learn the body language of everyone playing the game, getting smoother and better about anticipating which rise of their head is the one they will use to deliver their eye contact and salutation. Trying not to doubletake, fakie them out. I just ooze real energy and drum on everything, smile and work it. People like energy. I like energy.

There’s a company called G4S. They specialize in shipping packages carrying precious cargo. They charge a slice, then put fake labels on the outside of the boxes to thwart thieves. They send out particularly complex invoices. I used to flirt with their desk rep Lina at their basement office while I was filling out the shipping manifests on the counter, now she’s gone. She never worked there, was just subbing for two months. Now I swing my lanyard around my body, making a bubble of centrifugal metal, trying to develop thoughtless coordination. If you think, you hesitate too small to feel, but oh you’ll feel the wad of keys when they smack you in the temple. Believe you me. You’re always being watched. I know all the guards; most of our funny shallow little relationships, our two-month-long running conversations started with something they said to me after watching me on the cameras in the elevator. Talk music with Pat and Mike in the basement. They run the vault, saw me drumming on the walls in the elevator through the camera, playing the taunt bungee-chords like bass. Mike offered to sell me an old banjo after seeing that. Thank god, the thing’s awesome, I bought it in a flash. And Pat’s a drummer. In the evening they come and lock the rotating doors, tap on the surface of the counter to catch my attention that they didn’t realize they already had, say, “Time to go.” I do the jigsaw in reverse, and faster. I undo the jigsaw. It’s easier to undo. Careful, that.

I cook for us. I make lentil soup, vegetable sautes, cheese toast. ‘Bout to make momma’s hummus. Been soaking chickpeas. You can buy them dried and in bulk at a store over on 55th and 8th avenue. Buy ‘em for cheap. Crazy cheap, dried goods. S’fun to watch them expand in water. This is a good place to watch things. And tomorrow it will snow again.

{This was written with a late cup of black tea. Tea contains caffeine. Caffiene is one of America’s favorite drugs. Makes me stretched and static. Takes the humor out of the text, but makes it come fast. Makes it come in squares. And squares stack easy. Niiice and easy.}

To Health!